November 7, 2012 |
Oh, oh, oh, it’s the classics issue. And so, in celebration, we’re featuring a pair of blue jeans. Like the ones here from Diesel. Because they are: a) classic, and b) blue. Described by Diana Vreeland as the most beautiful things since the gondola.
So, the story goes that blue jeans were conceived in 1853, during the California gold rush, by a German immigrant. Apparently, our hard-working pioneer set out west from New York with a small supply of goods and a dream to turn his brothers’ New York dry-goods store into a bicoastal empire. Shortly after his arrival in San Francisco he was asked what he was selling. Why, hard-wearing canvas for tents and wagons, of course. At which point he was told, “You should have bought pants. Can’t no one find a pair of pants strong enough to last.” And so our entrepreneurial young man fashioned his canvas into trousers, which were popular amongst the mining community, but possessed one flaw. “They chafe.” So our young man substituted the canvas with a twilled cotton cloth from France that was called serge de Nîmes, and the blue jean was born.
However, the true dawn of the blue jean, the one that really should be written on stone tablets as the true story of the blue jean, broke in 1978, in a small Italian town called Molvena, where lived a young man with a dream of America, of denim. A dream to become the denim king. In fact, it probably began before then, when, in a small Italian town, a young boy’s mother sewed him his first jeans on a Singer machine in her kitchen. But anyway, his name was Renzo Rosso. His mission, to create the perfect blue jeans. Which he did. So perfect were they, he was dubbed the jean genius. Which, let’s be honest, isn’t a title that is bestowed on just anybody, which ergo makes his jeans the only jeans. The classics of the jean genre. Just make sure to get them in blue.
by Natalie Dembinska
